Suchergebnisse

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to explore the changes in commercial office occupiers' preferences in their building choice as a result of a recent natural disaster which triggered policy changes in building safety.Design/methodology/approach– This study follows a qualitative research design comprising semi-structured one-on-one interviews with 24 property professionals (commercial leasing agents and property managers) in Auckland, New Zealand. A thematic analysis was employed for identifying, analysing and reporting themes emerged within data.Findings– Tenants across New Zealand now incorporate earthquake issues in their leasing decisions. Most tenants are familiar with the impending policy changes related to earthquake-prone buildings. The degree to which building standards are incorporated into office occupiers' choice varies with the size of the organisation and their willingness to invest in their corporate social responsibility. A certain level of overreaction was observed in tenants' behaviour in the face of risk and uncertainty following the earthquakes. However, risk appears to be subsiding and emphasis is placed on availability of space in desirable locations.Research limitations/implications– The findings are limited due to a non-random sample selection and a small sample size. Further quantitative research is required to determine if office tenants place a premium on occupying seismically safe buildings since forthcoming regulatory changes have been announced.Practical/implications– This study provides evidence that imminent building policy changes are efficient in raising public awareness and informing perceptions of potential losses following a recent natural disaster event. Building owners can potentially capitalise on tenants' desire to occupy high quality space.Originality/value– This is the first study that develops the knowledge base identifying the perceptions of tenants about seismic safety of buildings since the Canterbury earthquakes. The study also contributes to the literature on the market effect of policy changes triggered by a focusing event.

A feature of modern political life is the use of the Internet, a factor that emerged in Ukraine's 'Orange Revolution'. Traditional studies of structurally organized political actors -- institutionalized opposition - underestimate the important role of grassroots components of political debate, in which the Internet has become a medium in which individuals have gained a public voice; its contents can be analysed as a significant supplement to official public sources of information, giving a wider perspective from the grass-roots domain. This is especially important in view of the gap between Ukrainian institutionalized opposition (which demonstrates a 'situated' solidarity) and grass-roots groups (which exhibit a readiness for public dialogue). Adapted from the source document.

The article is devoted to the analysis of vaccination discourses as ways of constructing and transforming social reality. Vaccination is considered, firstly, as a direction of state policy in the social and medical sphere; secondly, as a basis for realizing a legitimizing identity or constructing a resistance identity. Based on M. Castells' concept of identity and the theory of discourse by E. Laclos and C. Mouffe, two discourses are distinguished that coexist in an antagonistic struggle – "for" (support) and "against" (resistance) to vaccination. The state is the main subject of the formation of the discourse for vaccination, constructing a legitimizing identity. The nodal points of this discourse are analyzed in the sphere of the regulatory law, particularly, in the Roadmap for COVID-19 Vaccines. This discourse is constructed on the nodal points of inclusion (being vaccinated means "being included" and having access to certain benefits), trust (in health care system and the vaccines), safety (both on the individual and national levels). The discourse "against" vaccination, which is the basis for the formation of the resistance identity, is characterized by the absence of the main subject of its construction. The channels of its objectification through which the media act becomes more significant than the status of the discourse constructing subjects. The nodal points of this discourse are analyzed in the context of new media – Ukrainian-language publications of the online media in Ukraine – as a space of the "culture of freedom" that creates the basis for the transition from mass communications to mass self-communications. Such discourse is constructed on interconnected nodal points of distrust and unsafety (the formation of scientific and medical doubts, discrediting the quality of vaccines, direct or indirect articulation of the sign of death). This study has recorded the exceptional significance of distrust as a point of catalyzing other nodal points and signs. The construction of discourses of support and resistance to vaccination occurs according to different algorithms: if, in the field of discourse struggle, the articulation of the point of distrust is sufficient for the dominance of the discourse of resistance, then for the discourse of support for vaccination it is necessary to construct various signs and nodal points to reproduce the positions of its dominance. It is obviously that public policy should provide for the meaningful integration of the nodal points of security and trust, as well as the construction of a new nodal point of rallying, which should be articulated not only in the legal framework, but also in the plurality of discourse fields that form the discourse of support for vaccination (speech officials, communications from the responsible authorities and generally within the vaccination information campaign).

SUMMARY:
Cтатья посвящена проблеме неоднозначной языковой ситуации, которая сложилась в независимой Украине в результате взаимодействия унаследованной от советских времен языковой политики с "непрямой" языковой политикой постсоветского времени. Авторы анализируют высказывания студентов о статусе украинского и русского языков в особом контексте города Харькова, города с "мифологическим" имперским прошлым, который сейчас находится в процессе переопределения собственной идентичности в независимой Украине. Далее в статье рассматривается вопрос о том, какая роль отводится языку в проекте украинской нации и независимого государства. Наконец, авторов интересуют драматические репрезентации "русских" и "украинцев" в их отношении к лингвистическим стереотипам.